This special issue of Business History Review, guest-edited by historians Robert Fredona, Sophus Reinert, and Teresa da Silva Lopes, examines the different forms that capitalism has historically taken. It contributes to recent scholarship in business history and related fields about firms and the varieties of capitalism, which has been the subject of recent issues of Enterprise & Society (March 2024), Business History (2023), the Journal of World Business (February 2021), and past issues of this journal (Winter 2010 and Spring 2020). An introductory essay by the guest editors explores the historiographical foundations of this subject and provides an overview of the issue’s contents and contributions. There, the guest editors define their subject by noting that “distinct forms of capitalism were systems dominated by different forms of enterprises and institutions, by specific forms of organization, communication, transportation, and production; and even…by novel anthropological forms.” Peter Hall, whose 2001 book Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (co-authored with David Soskice) influenced modern debates, bookends their introduction by describing a current “form” of capitalism in his article, “Growth Regimes.”
Several of the other contributors to this special issue explore international business before the nineteenth century. Elena Shadrina’s article examines twelfth-century Venetian merchants. Benedita Câmara, Teresa da Silva Lopes, and Robert Fredona analyze mercantilist brands. And Mary O’Sullivan assesses the political economy of the British system of “colonial capitalism” in the late eighteenth century by examining British Prime Minister William Pitt’s proposals for free trade with Ireland. Other articles discuss twentieth-century forms of capitalism. D’Maris Coffman and Roberto Scazzieri explore early twentieth-century economist Albert Aftalion’s conception of structural economic change within industrial capitalism as a model of development. Noelle Turtur examines fascist Italy’s attempt to forge a “mercantilist, corporatist variety of capitalism” in its African empire, and the tensions that this state-centered approach created between the state and elite Italian industrial and financial interests. Bernard Harcourt discusses Franz Neumann’s symbolic Behemoth representing the political economy of the Nazi state.
The issue also features reflections by Rebecca Henderson and Joel Bakan on the morality of firms.
Finally, the issue contains two review essays. Richard John’s review essay, “Reimagining Business: Virtue, Spirituality, Wisdom” discusses Geoffrey Jones’s new book Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership. In addition, Richard Tedlow reviews Richard N. Langlois’s The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise.
